Artist Statement

Diverse and integrative, my artistic practice is at the intersection of traditional painting and digital art. Unique objects emerge through the tectonic production process; even the most sublime digital images are not always saved, but rather are transformed through the printing process on artistic materials such as acrylic, fine art paper and aluminum. Other interventions include digital enhancement and handwork such as acrylic brushwork on the surface of printed imagery.

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In many of my works, I offer a reinterpretation of elements of digital art, photography and the dissembling of Cubism and Futurism. This admixture of style draws from the long-standing modern and colonial artistic traditions of my hometown Villa de Leyva, Colombia, the site of the home of Luis Alberto Acuña the renowned twentieth century modernist painter, as well as a vibrant community of artists and artisans.

Building on these themes, my most recent series Untitled (2014) includes elemental portraits and groups of nudes veiled in aqueous layers of painterly pigment, mysterious and seductive. In some images, the emblematic figure appears within a dynamic shattering of planes and geometric deconstruction. Bright color is used in parallel to smoky translucent surface, echoing the texture of painting and the scattering of a painter’s brush. These combinatory processes are key to the nature of the work, and allow an emergent creative process as well as the creation of singular objects.

At the core are concepts of originality and reproduction, and in many of my series there is a play between digital imagery and the tradition of painting. These thematics are seen in motifs and painterly techniques from historical modern styles such as Geometric Abstraction, Cubism, and Impressionism as well as nineteenth century European painting and the British Pre-Raphaelites.

The classical image of the female nude reoccurs in many innovative fashion editorials, as well as various artistic endeavors such as the two collaborative Painted Nudes (2013) utilizing body painting, film and photography. In the painterly collection of images, Fabric a Dress (2012), the models are draped in Grecian fabric dresses made by the women themselves, creating portraits that echo the sensual and dreamlike images of fin de siècle art nouveau, particularly the colorful elongated nudes of Gustave Klimt. Intended as a commentary on the idea of labels and haute couture, haptic details act as a metaphor for the idea that vision spans beyond purely studio arts. Furthermore, authorship and image making is central to this work, like Klimt whose women looked outwards and as such were participants in the display of beauty and sexuality; here the collaboration contributes to the beauty and creativity of the series. Originality can be found in all mediums, whatever the purpose.

Such themes are also important to the esoteric series The Igus Project (2013). In large format photos printed on bond paper, the iconic motif of the female nude now collides with use of DNA imagery, hybrid creatures, and repeating symbiotic forms, a commentary on the complex issues of cloning and even immortality.

Abstraction also plays a key role in my process such as in the Color Lab series (2013). Designed in CAD, giclée prints on wood materialize as labyrinths of striated color. Vibrant and complex, the trompe l’oeil effect is at once kinetic and rigorous, oscillating between images of the vortex, constellations, and the organic patterning found in nature. In this series, the constraints of genre are overcome, here you find design, painting and sculpture in one, perspective and spatial relationships are abstracted through the use of continuous repeating vertical and horizontal lines, a meeting of form and design. The bright palette reflects the influence of my photography studies in Havana, Cuba and Columbian visual culture, including traditional textiles, modern and contemporary art, as well as the textured and energetic painting of Alejandro Obregon.

Key concepts in my practice include repetition, reproduction, the spheres of the digital world in contrast to the physical world, traditions of painting and handiwork, and the marrying of these practices to construct unique, beautiful, color saturated objects, reflective of artistic process and invention. My imagery shows the maker’s hand, and evokes a mythic world of pixilated geometry, iconic beauties, allegory and metaphor.